Do we really need them ? I mean sometimes I ask myself what’s the point of all the so-called ways to get things done or tons of guides for getting you to be a “better” you, like NLP, the secret of life and all that stuff.
To quote Nassim N. Taleb: “I went to a happiness conference: researchers looked very unhappy”. This really strikes mea as big problem of modern society, maybe is something related to herd-mentality, we want to be stupid and not believe or motivate ourselves by the sheer power of our will. We suffer from a disease: the laziness of the will, gone is the will to power (or any other philosophical system that puts you in control of yourself, like existentialism for a change)
...I’ve started thinking about it after I read this article and this tweet got me going for a couple of days: “My whole life I’ve been fighting entropy, maybe it’s time I stop fighting” by @stevenbristol. I love stuff like this, makes me ponder on what would be the best way one could choose and what would the solution imply, let’s say, in an empirical way.
Firstly, one must define entropy, so here’s my cherry picked definition: “…entropy is a measure of the uncertainty associated with a random variable.”1. Of course there are more, but I like this one because it works almost flawlessly as a metaphor for life itself: that random variable = life, entropy being the hazard (one should take this with a grain of whatever he/she likes, it’s merely a reductionist definition for the purpose of this article).
Needless to say, I’m an avid user of Firebug, let’s face it: without it, web development would suck big time, yes we do have other variants but firebug remains the status quo, for me at least. Yet this is not an article about how to develop web apps with Firebug, no, is an article about how one can use it to have a little fun and be more practical.
Everyone hates ads, well maybe hate is a bit too much, everyone dislikes ads, I know I do. In Firefox we have the AdBlock Plus extension. Does the job pretty nicely, yet nicely, doesn’t fit my taste, why you may ask ? Well firstly, its not that fast and breaks my development by taking me out of the flow
Yes, I've attended one more conference Programatica 2010, this one was axed on programming. It started with some interesting to not-so-interesting presentations of the partners. What I've loved about them, was that they contrasted each-other pretty nicely to a point when it was actually funny.
I've observed something interesting about the big names, like IBM, Microsoft and Oracle: they're starting to converge their developer tools to open-source inspired models. How ? Well, let's take their presentations one by one: Oracle ADF - this is an interesting framework for developing enterprise class application, for what I've seen is a set of extensions to JavaEE in the vein of the Spring Framework this is nice and all that but I don't really like uber-complex IDE's (they might appear to save you time...
